PLAIN AND SIMPLE

In the new Peter Weir movie, “Witness,” an eight-year-old Amish boy (Lukas Haas), on his first trip to a city, sees a murder taking place in the men’s room of Philadelphia’s Thirtieth Street train station. In order to protect the boy and his mother, Rachel, a widow (Kelly McGillis), from the killers, John Book (Harrison Ford), the police captain who’s in charge of the investigation, tries to hide their identities, and, with a bullet wound in his side, drives them back to their farm in Lancaster County before he collapses. At that point, the film has already built up the contrast between the devout, gentle Amish and the greedy, brutal Philadelphians—seen through the eyes of the child, who takes in everything. In the days of silent pictures, the distinction between rural virtue and big-city vice was a standard theme. The girl on the farm was steadfast; she represented true, undying love. The city girl was fast and spoiled and selfish. This split between good farmers and bad urban dwellers takes an extreme form in “Witness.” Last year’s rural trilogy (“Country,” “Places in the Heart,” and “The River”) prepared the way: moviegoers have been softened to accept the idea that people who work the land are uplifted by their labor. And “Witness” goes the trilogy one better by having its farming people part of a pacifist religious community that retains an eighteenth-century way of life and stresses “plainness.” (The Amish reject buttons as decorative.) Also, in the past twenty years we have been battered by so much evidence of crime in the cities that moviegoers may be ready to believe that city people are, of necessity, depraved. “Witness” seems to take its view of the Amish from a quaint dreamland, a Brigadoon of tall golden wheat and shiny-clean faces, and to take its squalid, hyped-up view of life in Philadelphia from prolonged exposure to TV cop shows. Murder is treated as if it were a modern, sin-city invention.

Though you can feel in your bones that a solemn cross-cultural romance is coming, the first section of the story moves along at an even clip until John Book’s collapse. There’s even a bit of visual comedy in the train station, when the little boy, in his black suit and broad black hat, thinks he sees another member of the sect: he walks over to an elderly Orthodox Jew, and the two look at each other in wordless rejection. But the narrative is becalmed during Book’s recuperation at Rachel’s farm, because the screenwriters (Earl W. Wallace and William Kelley) haven’t provided him with any plan of action. When he rushes Rachel and the boy back to safety among the Amish, it’s because he has learned that the killers are his superiors in the police department, who are involved in a twenty-million-dollar narcotics deal. But once he knows that, his mind seems to go dead. During his stay among the Amish, he gets out to a nearby town and phones the only cop he can trust—his partner—who wonders if they should go to a reporter or to the F.B.I. The suggestion seems to fall into a void, and Book just waits for the killers to track him down and show up at the farm. Maybe the movie is trying to tell us that the whole American system is so rotten that Book has no recourse—that there’s no agency that isn’t contaminated. Whatever the moviemakers had in mind, the way the story is set up there’s nothing for us to look forward to but the arrival of the bad guys and the final fit of violence.

While we wait, “Witness” is a compendium of scenes I had hoped never to see again. There’s the city person stranded in the sticks and learning to milk a cow, and—oh, yes—having to get up at 4:30 A.M. to do it. There’s the scene with this city person sheepishly wearing clothes that are too short and look funny on him, so that the countrywoman can’t restrain herself from giggling. There’s the barn-raising (out of “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”) and all the hearty fellowship that goes with it. There’s the natural woman who stands bare-breasted and proud; in earlier American movies, the film frame used to cut her off at the bare shoulders, but you got the idea. “Witness” also takes first prize in the saying-grace department: a whole community of people bow their heads over their vittles. It’s like watching the Rockettes kick. We can’t have prayers in the public schools, but movies are making up for it.

Weir, an Australian filming in this country for the first time (“Witness” was shot in Pennsylvania), has succumbed to blandness. Book’s stay at the farm is like a vacation from the real world; the rural images have a seductive lyricism that’s linked to the little boy’s dark, serious eyes. He’s a subdued child—boyish only in his quiet curiosity and low-key playfulness. Lukas Haas is a good little actor—his shyness is lovely—but the moviemakers’ conception of the boy is so idealized it’s as if they’d never been driven nuts by the antics of a real, live child. This kid never develops beyond our first view of him. He doesn’t argue with his mother, he doesn’t complain, he doesn’t make any noise. He’s a miracle of politeness and obedience—a walking ad for fundamentalist orthodoxy. But Lukas Haas at least stays in his perfect character. As his mother, Kelly McGillis is like a model in a TV commercial that reproduces a seventeenth-century painting of a woman with a pitcher of water or milk. She shifts uneasily between the heroic naturalness of Liv Ullmann and the dimpled simpering of the young Esther Williams. She’s so dimply sweet that when she’s happy she’s like a wholesome, strapping version of a Disney Mouseketeer.

The moviemakers try to balance things by introducing the suggestion that the sect is narrow-minded; Rachel is warned that her interest in John Book is causing talk among the Amish and could result in her being “shunned.” But the whole meaning of the movie is that her life and her child’s life are far better than anything the two could experience in the outside world. And, of course, John Book comes to love Rachel and her bonnet too much to want to expose her to the ugliness outside. (The spoiled city woman is represented here by Patti LuPone, who plays Book’s divorcee sister—a tense urban type to the ultimate degree.) It’s suggested that the women in the community don’t take part in the decision-making, but never that there’s anything basically repressive or stultifying about living in this authoritarian society without music or dance, without phones or electricity, without the possibility of making friends in the outside world. The picture isn’t interested in what life in such a closed-in community might actually be like for a woman or a child. The farm country is used as a fantasyland for the audience to visit; it has its allure, but you’re ready to leave when Book goes—you wouldn’t want to live there and get up at 4:30 A.M. and work like a plow horse. ‘‘Witness’’ uses the Amish simply as a way to refurbish an old plot. And as soon as you see Rachel’s galumphing Amish suitor (Alexander Godunov), with his dear, mischievous grin, you know that the film is going to avoid any real collision of cultures, and the risk of giving offense. The suitor is there so that John Book can make the right, noble decision. He makes the decision for both himself and Rachel. The implication is that, coming from the world of violence and being a man who uses a gun—i.e., a sinner—he knows that there’s no possibility of true happiness out there.

The picture is like something dug up from the earliest days of movies: it starts off, during the titles, with the wind blowing through the wheat, and the actors often look posed. Weir seems less interested in the story than in giving the images a spiritual glow. (It’s easy to imagine this picture being a favorite at the White House.) It must be said that Harrison Ford gives a fine, workmanlike performance, tempered with humor. The role doesn’t allow him any chances for the kind of eerie intensity he showed in his small part as a burned-out Vietnam veteran in the 1977 “Heroes,” and he doesn’t have the aura that he has as Han Solo and as Indiana Jones, but he burrows into the role and gives it as much honesty as it can hold. He’s not an actor with a lot of depth, but he has an unusual rapport with the audience—he brings us right inside John Book’s thoughts and emotions. Granting him all that, I must also admit that the only time I really warmed to him here was when he suddenly broke out of character and, his face lighting up demoniacally, parodied a TV commercial as he cried out, “Honey, that’s great coffee!” (It’s a free-floating joke, like Jack Nicholson’s “Here’s Johnny” in “The Shining.”) It’s a measure of how sedate the movie is that you feel a twinge (as if you were being naughty) when you laugh.

But my instincts tell me that this idyllic sedateness could be the film’s ticket to success. In its romanticism and its obviousness, “Witness” has got just about everything to be a “Lost Horizon” for the mid-eighties. There’s the charming, obedient child, and there’s the widow whose eyes flash as she challenges John Book to look at her nakedness. (And—I swear I didn’t make this up—a storm is raging on the night she flashes him. It’s the same storm that used to rage for Garbo when her passions rose.) There’s the implicit argument that a religious community produces a higher order of human being than a secular society. There’s something for just about everyone in this movie—even the holistic-medicine people. John Book’s bullet wound is healed by folk remedies: Rachel gives him herbal teas and applies poultices to the affected area. (I’m disposed to have some trust in the efficacy of these methods, but I still wish that just once somebody in a movie who was treated with humble ancient remedies would kick off.) Scenes like the one in which some showoff kids try to provoke the Amish to fight can be discussed by editorial writers and in schools. All those dug-up scenes are probably just what is going to sell the movie. There’s a little paradox here; “Witness” exalts people who aren’t allowed to see movies—it says that they’re morally superior to moviegoers. It’s so virtuous it’s condemning itself.

“Blood Simple” has no sense of what we normally think of as “reality,” and it has no connections with “experience.” It’s not a great exercise in style, either. It derives from pop sources—from movies such as “Diabolique” and grubby B pictures and hardboiled steamy fiction such as that of James M. Cain. It’s so derivative that it isn’t a thriller—it’s a crude, ghoulish comedy on thriller themes. The director, Joel Coen, who wrote the screenplay with his brother Ethan, who was the producer, is inventive and amusing when it comes to highly composed camera setups or burying someone alive. But he doesn’t seem to know what to do with the actors; they give their words too much deliberation and weight, and they always look primed for the camera. So they come across as amateurs.

The movie is set in a familiar, cartoon version of Texas, where Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya), a swarthy middle-aged Easterner with a wrestler’s crouch, owns a roadhouse, the Neon Boot, and thinks he owns his young wife, Abby (Frances McDormand). When she leaves him and goes off with one of the bartenders—tall, well-built Ray (John Getz)—Marty hires Visser (M. Emmet Walsh), a sweaty, good-ol’-boy private detective, to follow the pair, and after Visser, grinning with malign satisfaction, shows him pictures of the two cuckolding him in a series of positions (it’s like a porny slide show) he makes a deal with Visser to kill them. The plot is about how the detective takes Marty’s money and double-crosses him. The one real novelty in the conception is that the audience has a God’s-eye view of who is doing what to whom, while the characters have a blinkered view and, misinterpreting what they see, sometimes take totally inexpedient action. “Blood Simple” gets almost all its limited charge from sticking to this device, which gives the movie the pattern of farce—it works best when someone misinterprets who the enemy is but has the right response anyway. (It’s like a bedroom farce, except that the people sneaking into each other’s homes have vicious rather than amorous intentions.)

Early in the movie, Marty and his only friend, a German shepherd named Opal, who’s like his shadow, sneak into Ray’s apartment, and Marty makes a grab for Abby. She breaks free by kicking him hard in the groin, and we know at once that “Blood Simple” is an art movie, because Marty moves front—to the camera—to throw up. It’s a splatter-movie art movie. Marty throws up again and again, and he’s a mighty good bleeder, too. One liquid or another is always splashing out of him. And there are film noir in-jokes: there’s a whirring, growling ceiling fan in just about every room in the movie. At one point, Coen cuts from Marty, in his office at the roadhouse, looking up at his fan to Abby, at Ray’s place, looking up at his fan. The cut should come across as funnier than it does—these moviemakers don’t always have their comedy timing worked out. And often you can’t tell if something is a gag or just a goof. When Abby, practically overnight, turns out to be living in a magnificent loft with huge arched windows, you may do a double take—she didn’t seem to be that chic a girl. Is it a gag when bullets are fired into a wall of her loft and the holes might have been made by cannonballs? I don’t know, and it doesn’t seem to matter. “Blood Simple” isn’t much of a movie; it’s thin—a rain-on-the-windshield picture that doesn’t develop enough suspense until about the last ten minutes, when the action is so grisly that it has a kick.

At moments, the awkwardness of the line readings is reminiscent of George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” but “Blood Simple” doesn’t have the genuine creepiness of the Romero film. And though the dialogue is much sharper and smarter than Romero’s dialogue, the actors talk so slowly it’s as if the script were written in cement on Hollywood Boulevard. The picture is overcalculated—pulpy yet art-conscious. It has the look of film noir, but it lacks the hypnotic feel, the heat and the dreaminess of effective noir. Even when the material leads us to anticipate something nasty, it often doesn’t payoff. When Ray goes to see Marty and tries to collect the two weeks’ pay that’s due him, they talk together while we look out the window that’s between them: there’s a huge, blazing incinerator behind the Neon Boot, and a couple of people are tossing large objects into it. In a movie as uninhabited as this one, if a gigantic prop like the incinerator isn’t going to be used for body disposal, surely whatever it is used for has to be comic? Coen sets up an inferno and then, except for a bloody jacket being thrown into it, nothing comes of it, one way or the other. Nothing comes of Opal, the German shepherd, either; she disappears, and nobody seems to notice—not even Marty. (This happened in “Rocky” and “Silkwood,” too. Sometimes I get the feeling that The Current Cinema is turning into The Lost Dogs Department.)

Joel Coen may flub the point of some of the scenes, and toss in inane closeups of a bludgeoning weapon to show us that it’s a piggy bank, but he knows how to place the characters and the props in the film frame in a way that makes the audience feel knowing and in on the joke. The film’s technique is spelled out for the audience to recognize. Coen’s style is deadpan and klutzy, and he uses the klutziness as his trump card. It’s how he gets his laughs. The audience responds (as it did at “Halloween”) to the crudeness of the hyperbole, and enjoys not having to take things seriously. The cinematographer, Barry Sonnenfeld, works in ghouls’ colors—thick, dirty greens, magentas, and sulfurous yellows. The film looks grimy and lurid; it seems to take its visual cues from the neon signs in the bar and a string of fish putrefying in Marty’s office. What’s at work here is a visually sophisticated form of gross-out humor.

Dan Hedaya’s performance as Marty the gusher is almost wrecked by too much lip curling between words, but Hedaya develops a funny presence—he’s like a primate version of Michel Piccoli—and his acting seems to get better when Marty is twitchy and writhing and only semiconscious. As Visser, the cackling obscenity, M. Emmet Walsh is the only colorful performer. He lays on the loathsomeness, but he gives it a little twirl—a sportiness. The Coens wrote the role with him in mind (they didn’t have anything in mind when they wrote Abby and Ray), and when Walsh is on-screen in his straw cattleman’s hat and his bulging yellow suit the muggy atmosphere is like congealed sweat. Visser drives a VW bug; he is a bug, a rotting one—he draws flies. Most of what’s framed by the camera is of no interest—it’s barely animate, except for Walsh. His broad buffoonery helps to ground the picture, to keep it jaundiced and low-down. (At one point, when Abby and Ray are in bed together and Visser takes a flashbulb snap of them, the director apparently can’t resist having the screen turn white, as if they’d been nuked. The effect nukes the tawdry genre Coen is working in.)

Film students looking at old movies seem to find it exciting when a cheap B thriller or an exploitation picture has art qualities, and they often make draggy, empty short films that aren’t interested in anything but imitating those pictures and their “great shots.” (The student directors of those shorts never know what to do with the actors—there’s nothing for them to express.) “Blood Simple” is that kind of student film on a larger scale. It isn’t really about anything except making a commercial narrative movie outside the industry. The Coens, who live in New York (Joel graduated from N.Y.U. film school), raised their million-and-a-half budget from private investors, most of them in Minneapolis, where the boys grew up. In interviews, the brothers (Joel was twenty-nine when he made the film and Ethan only twenty-six) are quick and bright; they sound as if they’d popped out of a Tom Stoppard play. But I don’t quite understand the press’s enthusiasm for these two young, well-educated Americans, the sons of college-professor parents, who want to make the most commercial kind of Hollywood movies but to do it more economically and with more freedom outside the industry. What’s the glory of making films outside the industry if they’re Hollywood films at heart, or, worse than that—Hollywood by-product? Joel and Ethan Coen may be entrepreneurial heroes, but they’re not moviemaker heroes. “Blood Simple” has no openness—it doesn’t breathe.

The reviewers who hail the film as a great début and rank the Coens with Welles, Spielberg, Hitchcock, and Sergio Leone may be transported by seeing so many tricks and flourishes from sources they’re familiar with. But the reason the camera whoop-de-do is so noticeable is that there’s nothing else going on. The movie doesn’t even seem meant to have any rhythmic flow; the Coens just want us to respond to a bunch of “touches” on routine themes. (These art touches are their jokes.) “Blood Simple” comes on as self-mocking, but it has no self to mock. Nobody in the moviemaking team or in the audience is committed to anything; nothing is being risked except the million and a half. ♦

Pauline Kael wrote for The New Yorker from 1967 until her retirement, in 1991.